Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @12:04AM
from the good-excuse-to-get-out-of-florida dept.

An Associated Press report details how the Florida Keys are starting to prepare for seasonal flooding and rising water levels overall. "A tidal gauge operating since before the Civil War has documented a sea level rise of 9 inches in the last century, and officials expect that to double over the next 50 years." Flooding used to be a much rarer occurrence, but now many businesses are finding it necessary to have plans in place to deal with it. "The Keys and three South Florida counties agreed in 2010 to collaborate on a regional plan to adapt to climate change. The first action plan developed under that agreement was published in October and calls for revamped planning policies, more public transportation options, stopping seawater from flowing into freshwater supplies and managing the region's unique ecosystems so that they can adapt, too." The Keys are one of many places beginning to seriously evaluate their options for dealing with flooding after witnessing the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

I lived in Key West for several years. It is a fun place, the entire keys are great. Mainland Florida can sink into the ocean for all I care, just leave the keys alone.
They are pretty open to anyone, as long as you aren't an ignorant, uptight redneck. Decent rednecks are welcomed.

The Keys are one of many places beginning to seriously evaluate their options

Like relocation to higher ground? Awesome vacation spot, not such a good idea to move in. Of course, I support people being able to live in inherently unsafe places, the only time I get grumpy is when people get disaster relief and spend it on rebuilding in those places. I'm not against the relief, I'm against it being so damned temporary.

Sure, the story talked about that. But what caught my eyes was "has documented a sea level rise of 9 inches in the last century, and officials expect that to double over the next 50 years". It's a typical climate change non-story.

Dim as only a Republican oil lamp can be. Yes we know all major coastal cities have only a fifty life span, at the end of that time they are abandoned and everyone relocates to one of the spare earth coast lines. Proportional king tides and storm surges are also nothing to worry about, same for a rising water table bringing salts closer to the surface where they can contaminate fresh water supplies and poison salt intolerant vegetation.

Dim as only a Republican oil lamp can be. Yes we know all major coastal cities have only a fifty life span, at the end of that time they are abandoned and everyone relocates to one of the spare earth coast lines. Proportional king tides and storm surges are also nothing to worry about, same for a rising water table bringing salts closer to the surface where they can contaminate fresh water supplies and poison salt intolerant vegetation.

The grown ups here are speaking of an 18 inch sea level rise over 50 years. While that might cause some degree of increased harm from storm surges or a bit of salt water intrusion into water tables, it's not going to cause us to abandon cities. Nor are we leaving future generations to die since an 18 inch sea level rise isn't much.

most people take pride in trying to leave the world a better place than what they got, why, because humanity that's why. Those that don't, well, psychopath, that's why.

If you're really interested in all that, then advocating tackling real problems like poverty, corruption, desertification, disease, overpopulation, etc. As I understand it, about

Those real problems you list are important, but so is climate change. We always have multiple people working on multiple problems. Its too difficult to convince everyone of the most important thing to do first, so we just let them use their free will and what not to tackle the problem they find they can best make an impact on. Often in human development, we discover something by accident that ends up being a better solution to a problem than those in the field have come up with. Heck, even in physics there

As to the rest of your post, why should we squander a vast amount of our wealth and infrastructure on climate change while ignoring these more important problems? My view is that climate change mitigation simply is not worth doing at the current price. The opportunity costs of it are an indication of the terrible human cost that it has.

In trying to reduce greenhouse gasses, they'll increase the efficiency of energy production, distribution, and the end use of it.

The thing is that isn't our highest priority. Why are we doing that at the expense of our bigger prob

Given that the world population is a concern with regards to climate change, it is not in the best interests of those who want to slow climate change to stop malaria.

That's an ignorant point of view. The problem is that malaria affects far more people than it kills. Glancing at Wikipedia, I see 200 million cases of malaria each year and only 1 million deaths each year. Further, a number of those infections are chronic, meaning they'll reoccur over many years, crippling the person each time they manifest. A disease which kills a small number of people, but harms 3% of the world's population each year is not an ally of population control advocates. It merely makes the ove

Excepting only the last, our best projections expect climate change to exacerbate each of the problems you list.

But not by much. Further, if you deal with those problems, you also eliminate most of the harm that climate change is supposed to do. Such as responsive and effective disaster response greatly reduces the effects of the "extreme weather" harm that is supposed to be an aspect of climate change.

I really don't understand why you have such a massive emotional investment in ignoring our best available science?

Far more important than climate change in my life time, i'll be dead in 50 or so years so it won't be a problem to ME

If that were my attitude, then I wouldn't bother considering any of these problems I listed. None of them are problems (well aside from corruption) for me or people I care about. But if you rationally consider this stuff, then you have to put climate change pretty far down the list because a) it's not urgent, and b) it doesn't actually cause that much trouble.

I don't know why people regularly accuse me of not caring about the future. If they really did care about the future and rationally think about it,

Those other problems affect the economy. You are a part of the economy, so those problems do affect you.

Impoverished people are a small part of the economy. Sure, if their world was greatly improved, that would be a great economic "rising tide" that would be some help. But if their lot isn't improved, it won't change my world noticeably.

Instead of "if that were my attitude, then I wouldn't bother", it's more like that "if those problems you listed didn't affect you, you wouldn't be mentioning them"

I see you're saying below "Because if you look like a duck...". So how come you gloss over this? Those problems don't affect me or mine despite your lazy assertions to the contrary. They merely affect a lot of people in the world unrelated to me in any

Ok, you completely misunderstood my post. Lets try over the top sarcasm to drive the point home.

What are you doing *right now*? Are you working on ending malaria? If not you are doing it at the expense of millions of people dying right now!!!! What is you job? If its not researching malaria drugs, then quit it NOWWW! Go back to school, mortgage your house for tuition, live in a cardboard box, to study. No TV, No Food other than corn meal and road kill. Everything else is a waste of money that only kills mil

What I said was that:
1) the things you say don't affect you, actually do
2) as such, the other people are correct that you don't care for the future (thus the reason you keep being accused of such... the glove fits)
3) it is OK to not care so much for the future. You don't have to try to present yourself to care for the future.

Ok, so you said that. It is a remarkable waste of your time and effort to say things that are so divergent from reality, but hey, say whatever you want. I'll just remark on them briefly for your future personal betterment.

For point 1), slightly higher prices for goods is an effect, but not much of one. So yes, you are technically true that I am affected to some minuscule degree by everything bad that happens in the world. But the lion's share of the harm of these things falls on the people who are direct

Need I remind you that the traditional scenario of the broken window fallacy was very beneficial for the glass makers? What made it a fallacy was claiming that what was good for the glass maker was good for society.

Which doesn't change that you are still much more impacted by the things you mentioned than by AGW.

Well, I suppose that is true. But as I note above, impact is not the same as harm.

No, your defense here is the non sequitur. It doesn't matter that we don't have perfect knowledge, what matters is that you had enough knowledge to believe that issues you listed have more immediate need for attention than issues relating to AGW.

Again with the non sequiturs. Your assertions do not follow from your premises. For example, just because I don't believe that AGW is something we need to deal with now, doesn't mean that I always will feel that wa

It's all about the storm surgetwo thirds of Key West was underwater during Wilma [google.com]. That used to be a once in a generation thing. Then it's going to be every 20 years. Then every 5. Even if it doesn't turn into New Atlantis, that's gonna put a real crimp in the island lifestyle.

Even though I do agree that our sea level is rising here in the Keys, this is a bit alarmist. Most of the Keys is 1 meter or less above sea level. My yard is about 4 feet, in fact. This means that we often disappear from the map for a few days in any appreciable storm surge. This isn't novel, and certainly isn't once-in-a-generation. In fact, it's already every 5-10 years, and we're overdue. I furthermore fail to see what hydrological difference will be made by an additional, say, 5 inches of water, vis-a-v

Sure, the story talked about that. But what caught my eyes was "has documented a sea level rise of 9 inches in the last century, and officials expect that to double over the next 50 years". It's a typical climate change non-story.

It takes a special kind of stupid to not believe that eighteen inches of sea level rise will cause significant effects. As well, "Over the next 50 years" means nothing. Anything that happens in the next five years also happens in the next fifty. Note that ice on land is still melting faster than expected. That means sea level rising faster than expected. But I would appreciate it if you would move to The Keys.

In addition, no, I would not consider flooding by rising sea levels to be catastrophic - especially given the time frame it happens over (centuries). One can merely move to higher ground. There is a lot of higher ground throughout the world. And if for some reason, you want to stay in the same place, then you can build your own higher ground on the spot.

If a lot of people wandered into the ocean at a normal beach during low tide and stayed put and drowned as the tide moved in, we probably would consider

Note that you cannot sell your land/property to pay for moving. it is a total loss.

Well, don't hold it for a century after you move out then. Why storms and such will occasionally destroy land (such as cutting a large channel through former beach property), most such degradation is over decades or centuries. At that point, it's not much of a factor.

Folks on independent island archipelagos such as Togo or Micronesia can move to any country that has room to take them which at my last count stands at Zero.

They can move to Australia, New Zealand, or the US. All three have plenty of room and a history of taking in people from the Pacific Islands.

There is about as strong scientific consensus on human influenced climate change leading to drastic consequenses as there is for evolution.

No, there isn't. There's a decent consensus that global warming is partly man-made, but that's a far cry from your assertion that it leads to drastic consequences or the support that evolution has. To the contrary, all this debate is because there isn't such a consensus.

And I find it enlightening how the argument is based on consensus, not on evidence. Evolution is supported because it has a vast amount of evidence supporting the theory. "Climate change" is supported because there's a substantial funding

..and the disaster relief is used building just another shitty building that breaks.when they could be using it for building houses one feet higher up from the ground. fucking rocket science!?!?

One foot of stilts won't fix what's wrong with key west. One tsunami and the whole thing is gone, just gone. One good offshore seismic event, one big splashdown... byebye. Again, I'm not against people living there, I'm just against The People footing the bill.

I support people being able to live in inherently unsafe places, the only time I get grumpy is when people get disaster relief and spend it on rebuilding in those places

Would you be less grumpy were it to be shown that relocating everyone would be more expensive than rebuilding and improving? Granted, rebuilding has direct and predictable costs to the taxpayers, while it's difficult to quantify and predict the expense of everyone in affected areas moving inland, so I don't know that we'll be able to get simple numbers on that.

So how about when they live in a safe place and then others make it unsafe by altering the climate?

All too often the disaster relief money is enough to repair what you have but not enough to move elsewhere (given that your property just took a huge hit in resale value due to being a declared disaster area).

The Florida Keys have taken their present form as the result of the drastic changes in sea level associated with recent glaciations or ice ages. Beginning some 130,000 years ago the Sangamonian Stage raised sea levels to approximately 25 feet (7.5 m) above the current level. All of southern Florida was covered by a shallow sea [...] Starting about 100,000 years ago the Wisconsin glaciation began lowering sea levels, exposing the coral reef and surrounding marine sediments. By 15,000 years ago the sea level had dropped to 300 to 350 feet (110 m) below the contemporary level.

The Florida keys are an environment that's neither stable nor safe from flooding, and when you live near the water, you have to live with the fact that you need to move sooner or later. Even without anthropogenic warming, there would have been substantial sea level rise over the last century, and these precautions would be necessary and prudent.

I don't know the specific geology of the Keys, but most places with ocean interfaces are either raising or lowering with respect to sea level. For an example of short term movement, the shore of Japan close to the quake and tsunami in some cases is feet lower than it was before the quake because as the pressure built up over centuries, that land bowed upward, and when the stress was released the land dropped again. And on the Oregon coast there is a shallow marsh that before January of 1700 was a cedar forest, but it dropped six feet in that earthquake.

Other areas are dropping or rising more gradually. Many Pacific islands would be gradually going under water over the next few centuries regardless of the global sea level change.

Basically, the entire surface of the Earth is a bunch of scum piles being shifted around on an ocean of semi-liquid material, bumping into each other and tilting in various ways. As the Asian and Indian Ocean plates collide and tilt up to form the Himalayas, the other ends of those places are dropping. And there is now evidence that the Atlantic plate is cracking in the middle, offshore of Portugal because of similar activities.

...the entire surface of the Earth is a bunch of scum piles being shifted around on an ocean of semi-liquid material, bumping into each other and tilting in various ways

Generally, yes, but that ignores the fact that there are no plate boundaries nor obvious tectonic processes operating within any distance of the Florida Keys that can account for more than the most inconsequential sea level change over the last 150 years. In short, the keys are tectonically stable. A nine inch in rise in sea level over the last hundred years or so is consistent with the change in global sea level over the same period.

More generally, many ocean/continent boundaries are active margins, but far from all of them. Consider as counter examples the east coasts of North America and South America, the west coasts of Europe and Africa (despite evidence for incipient subduction off Western Europe, as it certainly doesn't currently dominate tectonic regime there), three sides of Australia, the east coast of Africa, the entire coastline of Antarctica, the northern coast of North America along the Arctic Ocean, and most of the northern coasts of Asia, are all passive margins. These areas as not devoid of tectonic activity, but it's usually mild compared to areas around the Pacific Ocean and other active continental margins.

It may also be worth observing that some parts of the world, especially Northern Europe and parts of North America, even where the tectonic environment is mild, are still isostatically rebounding upwards following the last glacial maximum. The ice sheets were so massive that they depressed the continents underneath them. Now that the ice has melted, the land is slowly rising back up from the viscous mantle upon which the continents float. In those places, with the land rising, local sea level may be falling. Isostasy can also locally affect other areas where there's a lot of geographic relief, such as in high continental plateaus where erosion unloads the land surface, or where high relief upstream contributes large volumes of sediment. The Florida Keys are not, however, subject to these processes.

The global average sea level, or sea level measured against an artificial reference point, is called eustatic sea level. Over hundreds of millions of years tectonic processes can affect eustatic sea level, but on shorter time frames the tectonic variation averages out: if rock is rising in one place, it's falling in another, so the contribution to sea level changes by tectonic processes are generally only local. For example, the sea level in the Florida Keys won't be affected by changes in the local sea level along the coast of Japan.

The biggest general contributor to most sea level change on the timescale of our species is climate, not deeper geologic processes. There is a minor component related to the thermal expansion of seawater, which accounts for probably about half the currently observed sea level rise, but the dominant longer term factor is variation in the amount of ice sequestered in continental ice sheets -- like the those that once covered much of North America and Europe, as well as the extant Antarctic ice sheets and Greenland Ice Sheet. Broadly speaking, throughout geologic history the amount of water impounded in continental ice sheets will tell you more about eustatic sea level than any other single factor. Back through the Pleistocene, if you had to guess how much water covered any random point on the globe, knowing the level of glaciation would on average give you a better answer than anything else. Sea level tracks very closely with glaciation.

You can look at the Greenland Ice Sheet as a remnant of the much larger Pleistocene ice sheets in the northern hemisphere during the last glacial maximum. The Greenland Ice Sheet contains enough water that if it were to melt or flow in to the ocean, eustatic sea level would rise a couple dozen feet even without contributions from other reservoirs. Since the late Pleistocene, eustatic sea level has ris

The key word here is anthropogenic I would guess. Nobody can deny that there is global warming, we're in an interglacial period, where I'm sitting now used to be under a kilometer depth of ice, the main discussion is how much of it we are responsible for.

The key word here is anthropogenic I would guess. Nobody can deny that there is global warming, we're in an interglacial period, where I'm sitting now used to be under a kilometer depth of ice, the main discussion is how much of it we are responsible for.

Last I read (which was several years ago), there is forcing from both directions: toward cold due to the winding down of the interglacial, and toward the hot due to anthropogenic causes.

The "toward the hot" is stronger than the "toward the cold" by something on the order of one watt per square meter, IIRC.

The fraction of atmospheric carbon dioxide that comes from fossil fuels can be measured, as can solar radiation influx, cloud cover, albedo etc. Calling it a discussion is a bit of a stretch to say the least, unless you by "how much" are talking about decimal places. What is being "discussed" (and by "discussed" I actually mean simulated and experimented on) is mostly how strong various feedback mechanisms are (such as increased tree growth, which buffers CO2 but also might reduce Earth's albedo, decreased

I don't know about the Keys in particular, but many places where we have pumped either oil or water out of underground resivoirs are sinking. Usually, but not always, slowly. (Undergound coal mining has the same effect, but the collapses tend to be more sudden and dramatic.)

Now parts of the Gulf have had lots of oil pumped out of them. Probably not near the Keys, but I don't know for sure. (It certainly affected New Orleans.) Agriculture has also extracte

Yah, it is odd that Jesus cares so much about Florida. Hey, maybe He's saving it for the Rapture. I know a few people I'd like to send off the planet first. You can book ahead, you know. And I'm fairly certain you can book people other than yourself for the trip.

For those that don't know the Florida keys are only a few inches above ocean levels even before the 1800 era. An 18 inch rise in sea levels would put the keys under water. these keys stretch for well over 100 miles and involve hundreds of islands. The area is also vital as a nursery for sea life. A slight rise in ocean levels is a clear cut disaster.

I don't know about the keys, but the everglades' water levels are dropping because of a combination of less rainfall than in the past (climate change?) and agricultural and other diversions of the water that should be flowing into the everglades. It has nothing to do with sea levels.

You don't say which flats you're specifically talking about. The Lower Keys, and the bayside area north of the Middle and Upper Keys, are full of tidal flats, that are generally covered, or nearly so, at high tide. But 'covered' in the sense that you can cross them with anything bigger than a kayak, no. Or perhaps you're referring to Florida Bay, which itself receives a lot of input from The Everglades, and yes, would definitely be lower now.

Why is the media so stuck on hurricane Sandy? Bigger hurricanes have hit the east coast down to the gulf and typhoons larger have hit the west coast, is it because of where it hit? Oh you weren't prepared sucks to be you. Living near the coast you should be ready, just because you haven't seen a hurricane hit your shore in 100 years or more doesn't mean the next one won't hit you head on.

MSL has risen 7.7 inches in 135 years in the rest of the world, but somehow has risen another 1.3 inches in the Keys in less time. I suspect that they are experiencing ocean water rise in conjunction with the natural eroding away of the islands themselves. You certainly wouldn't want to build any permanent (in terms of centuries) buildings on those islands.

Just clear them out - they're going to be flooded eventually, and paid for by the US taxpayer. The Keys have 1 foot in the grave and the other on the corpse of a poisoned manatee. They're an ecological and financial disaster waiting to happen.

I appreciate the sentiment and all, but I am not going to move. I promise not to make any insurance claims or anything else that would upset the mainlanders and drag them away from their shopping malls, tv shows, and whatever else they do for fun. Also, my boat stays pretty dry and has two working bilge pumps. I do not seem to be in danger of sinking.